According to a new poll Edward Snowden is viewed negatively by about two thirds of Americans. He is much more popular abroad.
What accounts for this difference? Does this reveal anything about America’s national character?
He committed treason against this nation. That’s going to give a good chunk of Americans a reason to dislike him.
Isn’t he that Australian bastard who founded Wikileaks, raped a woman in Norway, gave ISIS all our military secrets, smuggled nuclear secrets to Russia, and then committed suicide when he was being prosecuted? [/jk]
I don’t know what standard the ACLU is using for “familiar with Edward Snowden,” but it could screw up in two ways:
Some of the people who condemn him have only a vague idea of who he is, and might easily confuse him with Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, Aaron Swartz, or even the Rosenbergs!
If you try to exclude the ignorant, some of the people who would sympathize with him would be excluded.
Furthermore, it may well be that people find Ed Snowden creepy. He was working for a private company that illegally contracted with the government to spy on Americans. I imagine that to many true-blue freedom-loving Americans, he was a treasonous creep by virtue of his job before he decided to sell out the criminals he worked for; so in some eyes he’s a creep with no honor at all, which is even worse. (Yes, this analysis is insane. But it’s also pretty American.)
And I can’t discount the fact that many, many Americans are much too poor to hop on a plane and fly to Hong Kong and then to Russia on short notice. There may be some pure class resentment of Snowden for appearing to have done just that. To make that kind of money, working for the evil tax-and-spend government, which hired myriad spies to spy on hardworking poor Americans like us instead of doing something useful! Yeah, back to creep.
For the record, I respect Snowden a great deal; he’s a freakin’ patriot. But then I also admire the courage of Swartz, Assange, and various other “criminals” who moved secret information for what may have been the greater good—yes, even the Soviet Atomic Spy Ring, although that’s a whole other argument. Some secrets need to be exposed.
And I know the difference between Norway and Sweden. Sadly, I am not typical of my countrymen.
He told the truth to the people about the government. That’s the distinction; people vs. government. If that’s your idea of treason, then so be it.
You speak as if those were not two different words for the same thing.
The secrets he revealed could be used to harm US interests, but he exposed information about the inner workings of foreign surveillance programs. Foreigners therefore would be happy to learn what the US has been doing to them, whereas Americans would be more focused on the potential harm. Seems pretty bar stock to me.
Plus, I think the government has made a concerted effort to demonize him. Foreign governments haven’t been doing that.
They ARE two different words. Even the spelling is completely different. As are the definitions in the dictionary.
If people were the gov’t, why would we need someone like Ed Snowden to expose the details of the NSA programs?
It’s disingenuous to hide behind semantics to defend your wrong-headed position.
The people have decided that the government should have the power to keep secrets. Snowden violated that agreement.
The people were wrong in this case. QED.
I believe the OP established that the people don’t believe the people were wrong, so what authority are you relying on when you make that declaration?
The authority that tautological arguments are not reliably well constructed arguments.
Snowden’s actions embarassed the US and compromised intelligence operations while revealing intelligence gathering against other nations. Why would it be any surprise that he would be viewed considerably worse in the US than in other nations? That sounds incredibly obvious.
Hell, Snowden didn’t even read or even know everything that he stole. He just handed it all over to journalists to sift through. That’s a far cry from telling truth to the people about the government. I think that most people are okay with their government keeping national secrets. Maybe the poll should have been better written, do you think that there should be no national secrets? I’d be willing to bet that people around the world are okay with their own countries having national secrets, but are a less okay with what sort of secretive behavior other countries participate in. Given that, the poll doesn’t surprise me one bit.
I wasn’t consulted.
I have a Snowden t-shirt. I’m not lobbying to get him canonized or handed the Nobel peace prize but I totally salute him for what he did.
You were consulted on Election Day.
Snowden didn’t read everything, but he did read the parts that he thought everyone should know. Being picky takes time, so it’s better to get it all and sort it out later. And he wasn’t in any position to sort it out himself. He had to get it out so that he couldn’t be secretly snuffed out.
It’s not that countries can’t keep secrets. Its that we need safeguards in place to make sure the secrets they are keeping are the secrets we want them to keep. We’re talking fucking secret tribunals here. That should freak everyone out. You can have the trial in public while keeping the actual intelligence being discussed a total secret.
A representative democracy rests on the people being able to check those in power. This means that secrets have to be limited. We have to know the type of secret even if we don’t know the secret itself. We have to be able to make sure that the stuff happening behind closed doors is still beholden to our laws. We have to know the results of the laws we have passed to decide if we need to change them.
A national secret about a special weapon or military tactics or even military base locations is one thing. A national secret about secretly wiretapping Americans and storing all the info in a special database is another.
The fact that even a third of Americans still support Snowden, despite blatant pushing by the military which the majority of Americans worship is rather telling.
It’s must be nice to live in a black and white world. Simple, but nice.
Obviously, there’s no point targeting anti-whistleblower propaganda at a bunch of furriners who can’t vote for people who intend to continue and extend US government abuses even if they are successfully bamboozled.
Obviously not, or the latest generation of secure smartphones would have flopped when government bureaucrats started running around flinging feces and setting their hair on fire.
Being asked every few years which of two idiots I prefer to make all decisions for me during the intervening years doesn’t count. Especially if they never consult me while they’re in office.